1431 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 201, Chicago, IL 60642
By advance appointment only. Please email contact@chicagoartistscoalition.org
12.11
Resident Exhibition: 2025 Cohort 3 of 5
Gabriel Moreno Pablo Lazala Ruiz Mauricio López F.
Serena JV Elston
About Curators
Serena JV Elston is a curator and artist whose work interrogates the relationship between the body and structures of power. Her exhibitions explore themes of ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through an intersectional, post-colonial lens. Working with artists that experience chronic illness and disability, Serena focuses on platforming experiences of the oppression of bodies. Through her curatorial projects she examines the fragile interdependence of bodies and institutions, reframing disability as a site of resistance. Elston’s exhibitions challenge colonial legacies of labor and wellness, creating spaces that foster radical reimaginations of society and care.
Image: SPACORE Magazine Issue 001, 2024, 84 pages
Headshot: Steven Piper
About Artists
Gabriel Moreno is an American artist whose work spans sculpture, performance, and image-making. He relies on the immediacy of objects to explore notions of distance and the tensions tethering individuality with collectivity. His process is defined by responding to site, history, labor, and materiality as a method of perceiving their hybrid play across time.
Moreno graduated from Knox College (BA 2014) and The University of Chicago (MFA 2016).
Image: An Incidental Machine (Broken Mirror). Photo credit: Javier Bosque, Produce Model Gallery
Pablo Lazala Ruiz (b. Bogotá, 1992) is a Colombian artist, architect, exhibition designer, and educator living and working in Chicago, IL. He is interested in the specificity of spaces and in creating critical materiality that openly engages in conversation with the ideologies that haunt and inhabit them. He believes in the possibility of creating new spatial support platforms that invite voices from diverse contexts to manifest.
His practice investigates the dynamics that shape public and private spaces while questioning ideals of progress and colonization processes, particularly in Colombian and Latin American diasporas. This exploration often unfolds through invoking and burying physical and ideological structures. His work both reinforces and engages in conversation with spaces' rituals. It disassembles the rhetorics of architecture through removals, dwells within the languages of construction and its scaffolding's temporalities and materialities, and gravitates through the formal and conceptual structures of installation and sculpture to create intentional (re)positionings that reveal the systems produced by the built environment.
He received his MFA (2024) from the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the New Artist Society scholarship. He earned a BFA (2016, Honors) and a BA in Architecture (2019) from the University of the Andes in Colombia.
He has exhibited work in solo and group shows at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), Museum of the Bank of the Republic (Bogotá), The Wrong Biennale (Alicante/Bogotá), Santa Fé District Gallery (Bogotá), Compound Yellow (Chicago), Espacio Odeón (Bogotá), Espacio Más Allá (Bogotá), Nueveochenta, Liberia, and SGR galleries (Bogotá), and Chapinero ArteCámara Gallery (Bogotá). Since 2019, he has also worked as the director of architecture, exhibition designer, and installation coordinator for the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, with projects at MoMA, Serpentine Gallery, MCA Chicago, Sydney Biennale, and more.
Image: Pablo Lazala Ruiz, Andamio y Balsa (Scaffold and Raft), 2024, Red chalk powder, chalk reel line, raw clay, plantain leaf. Image Credit: Jonas Mikosch Müller-Ahlheim
Mauricio López F. is a Chilean artist currently based in Chicago. From a young age, he became deeply connected to the local experimental scene, performing with different sound acts. He studied Musical Composition at the Escuela Moderna de Música y Danza, guided by renowned composer Javier Farías. He was also selected by composer Luca Belcastro to participate in Copiú: Improvement Course in Composition and Interpretation of Contemporary Music. Later, he pursued a Bachelor's Degree in Aesthetics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he focused on avant-garde movements in the context of Chilean popular music, particularly the disruptive work of the Productora Mutante. He is a recent graduate of the MFA in Sound program at SAIC, where he received the New Artist Society Scholarship.
Currently, his practice explores the entanglement between visuality, sound, and motion by carefully tensioning them into unexpected social synchronizations. With a foundation in music, he has expanded into a broader territory of materials, which he navigates while dodging their expected roles. This seemingly unattached praxis distills his Chilean heritage, where discomfort finds refuge in sardonicism.
López F. often positions himself in complex terrains where confusion intensifies—and instead of leaving, he remains. Themes such as translation, miscommunication, labor, and cultural friction surface as he engages with the social layers embedded in the spaces he inhabits. Through a combination of sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and photography, he seeks to challenge sensory expectations, creating encounters that unfold through shifting and layered codes.
His work has been featured in Peru, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the United States, with recent highlights including the 30th anniversary exhibition of SITE Gallery and Expo Chicago 2025.
Image: Mauricio López F., Wind reenactment: Fig 1, 2025, Handrail, mechanism, miniature flag, and toggle switch, 45.67" × 3.54" × 48.82"
Headshot: Sage (Shu Tzu) Lin
